Italian politicians plan to celebrate the Liberation Day while bombing the Middle East

Once again, this April 25, Florence’s ruling class gathers at Piazza Signoria to celebrate the memory of the liberation, rejoicing and patting themselves on the back over another year of work well done. For all those who care to listen, they prepared beautiful speeches about the struggle for freedom. But who are they to talk to us about the liberation from fascism? The elites holding the reigns of the Florentine political institutions are not only those who, as we know too well, are destroying the city we live in, they are also the allies and accomplices of those who, from the left to the right, have governed the West.

They want to talk to us about the liberation from fascism. Those who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Those who, along with their friends and business partners, train the soldiers and sell the tanks that tear Syria apart. The same ones who have stamped their mark on the bombs that destroy the homes of Yemenite people. Those who play with the lives of entire populations on their geostrategic games for oil, money and power. The leaders who created the biggest wave of war refugees in decades. The people who poison the water in Guinea for profit. Those who spend billions financing perpetual war all around the globe. The same people who, with their alliances and the silences they entail, remorseless become accomplices of genocide, torture, and all sorts of deprivation. Those who open concentration camps in Libya and evict refugees from Hungary. Those who throw bombs abroad and tear gas at home. Those who, for as long as we can remember, have been destroying our planet and our lives.

When, on April 25 we remember the offenses of fascism, they sound oddly familiar. They sound too familiar. Because, for as long as we remember, our lives have been in the hands of people with an agenda of military interventionism animated by an imperialist drive not so different from that one the partisans fought against. That they want to talk to us about the liberation from fascism would be laughable if it wasn’t such a serious matter. In the absence of laughs or tears, the only thing we have to offer is rage. No, we will not stand quiet listening to this criminals, we won’t let them talk, they should be the last to have a voice on that topic.

When it comes to liberation from fascism, we know where to turn our heads. We listen to the new partisans, the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Zapatistas, the indigenous warriors and all those whose words do not sound false because, instead of beautiful speeches, they have history of taking up arms against fascism in its many forms. And we work to become like them, to take our liberation in our own hands because we are certain we cannot delegate it on those guilty of the new imperialism.